Rey's Day
by cbstevp
Summary: A quick look at the life of Rey on Jakku prior to meeting a strange little droid in the desert.


**Rey's Day**

For Rey, the day began like the many that had come before. She awoke in her steel home, already feeling the heat rise as the metal exterior began to absorb the sun's rays. The nights were cold and the days blistering hot, a fact of life on the desert planet of Jakku. Rey rolled out of her suspended hammock and let her bare feet touch the metal floor. Still a bit cool, she thought, as she absorbed some of it through the soles of her feet. That would soon change.

Her home was not much, half buried in the shifting sand dunes near the scrap fields located nearby Niima Outpost and Kelvin Ridge, but it was hers and no one would take it from her without a fight. It was a wrecked Imperial walker, officially termed an AT-AT in a mechanical book she had found inside the wrecked machine of war. It had once been a tall, dull grey, animal-like machine, built on four stout metal legs so it could walk into battle, with pulse laser cannons on its command post head, and a cargo bay that could carry a few dozen Storm Troopers. Now it was tipped on its side, rusting, and all its valuable parts had been stripped long ago, most of them taken by Rey herself.

A few years back her friend from a nearby village saw it soon after she had first moved in. "Oh," he had said as she proudly showed him her new home. "An Imperial walker."

He sounded a bit disappointed when he saw the new home she had talked about. His name was Lor San, and she had known him since she was a small girl. He was old and very tall, and human, and spoke her tongue, both of which were unusual for Rey. There were few of her kind on Jakku, and fewer still who spoke as she did, circumstances which led her to learn many languages, absorbing them as a necessity in order to get by on her strange world. Lor San told her the old Republic and Empire used her language as the standard or basic language of the galaxy, but she had never been anywhere but Jakku so did not know much about that. He also taught her much of the history of the galaxy, of worlds he had been to, of places he saw, of people he had met. She also suspected he knew much about her family that had left her here, but whenever she had asked him, he went silent, and only said, "They will come back soon." But they never did.

That day they were standing on a sand dune looking down on her home, the rusted Imperial walker, lying on its side, half buried in sand. "You don't have to live this way, Rey," Lor San had told her. "I have room in my tent, and others in the village would also take you in."

She felt a warmth for the old man, even though they rarely saw each other these days, and his kindness almost made tears spring to her eyes, but she shrugged them off. "Thank you, but no. It is not much, but it's mine. Besides, here I am closer to the scrap fields."

"You have your speeder," he had replied, referring to the burnt orange colored one-person mechanical transport that was sitting beside her home

"Fuel is not cheap."

"Yes, nothing ever is on Jakku," he had said thoughtfully. "What did Unkar Plutt say about you moving out here?"

"What could he say? My indentured service is up. I am a free woman. Even the local constable had to agree, so he stamped the papers." She took out a worn piece of paper from a pouch on her leather belt and showed it to him.

As he had read it and fingered the blue official seal of freedom he raised his eyebrows slightly. "I did not know your indenture service was finished. My old memory is to blame. Then that means you are now sixteen years old."

"Yes. Twelve years…twelve years I have been waiting."

"They will come back."

It was an old phrase, worn out by now, but she had still wanted to believe it. She had smiled slightly. "I know. Someday."

That had been three years ago. Freedom was hers, but not really. She still needed to eat, to have water, and on Jakku both were in short supply and controlled by ruthless people. So she worked, for her daily needs, and the debris of the local battlefield provided a means to live. As a child, at first she had only salvaged small bits scrap metal, but then as her knowledge of the machines grew she knew what valuable pieces to look for and also learned how to remove them without damaging them, how to polish and clean them to make them more presentable.

She was four when her family had left her with Unkar Plutt. She never understood it all, never knew why they had left her here with him, left her to serve him in his scrap metal business. Later when she was older he had explained it all.

"You belong to me!" he snarled. He was fat and ugly, a brute, a Crolute who had washed up here somehow or another, started a scrap metal business after the great Battle of Jakku, and had been living off the labor of people like Rey ever since. He had shoved the papers in front of her face. "Twelve years!" he had almost shouted. "Twelve years, or until they come back. My bet is the twelve years will be up long before then." He laughed at her when he said that and her hatred for him only grew.

But he had been right. Twelve years and more had passed, fifteen years altogether as one counted them on Jakku, over three hundred twenty-two hour days each year, depending on some small orbital fluctuations. She had learned about the stars and orbits and all that later when she had studied space navigation in an old book she found in a wrecked Rebel ship. Lor San came later, and she was seven years old the first time she had met him. One day he and Unkar argued and she later knew it was about her. After that Unkar seemed to hate her more, but at least he did not beat her like he and his men sometimes did the other scavengers. In all the years he had never laid a hand on her.

But still she was not free. As an indentured servant she had to do work for her room and board. The food was mostly dehydrated Imperial and Rebel rations left over from the wars. On Jakku the old Empire had placed a supply base, which later became the focus of the last great battle of the war that had been reaching the end ever since the second Death Star had been destroyed over Endor and the Emperor killed by his apprentice Darth Vader, a fallen Jedi knight, who had also died. Or so the tales went, when the inhabitants of Jakku ever talked on those times. How much was truth and myth no one knew, and fewer cared. All that mattered was that the wars had left behind on Jakku much food and wrecked machines of war, all valuable still. Some other food came in on the cargo ships that stopped and bought the scrap and machinery Unkar's platoon of scavengers gathered, but it wasn't much and it wasn't fresh food, not this far into the western reaches of the galaxy, out of the way of the mainstream planet systems. And little grew on Jakku.

Food was on her mind as she woke up. But first she checked her security. She slipped off her thin linen sleeping shift, and pulled on her breeches and top shirt. She put on her thick soled leather boots and grabbed her staff, a long metal shaft of various machine parts she had screwed and welded together to make a well-balanced fighting weapon. Lor San approved when he saw it on one of his infrequent visits and even taught her how to use it, the old man moving with a speed and agility she not thought possible.

"How do you do that?" she had asked in surprise after she had tried to repeat his moves, but tripped over her own two clumsy feet and lay sprawled in the sand.

"Oh, something I learned long ago," he had replied cryptically. "Get up. We fall and we get up and we try again, like in all things in life."

So she had and she had learned and wished he would have come to her home more often, but time was precious and he had things to do. Only recently when she had gone to his village to trade some titanium metal for a part she need for her speeder she had learned he had left Jakku on a ship and had not been seen for a long time.

Rey unlocked the hatch on her home and carefully looked outside. No one was there, but they could be on top or to the sides. She stayed very still and listened and heard nothing but her own breathing and the wind. Then in a mad dash she was up and running, out the hatch and swiftly spinning around, looking for danger.

No one.

She was alone.

As usual.

Her speeder was nearby, a heavy chain and lock securing it to the Imperial walker's head. She also removed the ignition starter each night, so no one could steal it…unless they had a spare starter. Well, it was an old model, a twin engine top and bottom hovercraft that used a low octane fuel that left clouds of black smoke behind the speeder every time she started it up. Rey had found it in the scrap fields a few years ago, damaged and abandoned, and maybe the owners thought it not worth the bother to fix. She found the right parts, and in a few weeks had it up and running.

Rey did a walkabout of her home, her thin, wiry body ready for a fight, but as she had already guessed no one was about. The only real danger out here was from other scavengers, like Teedo, another independent scavenger and one of her rivals, or the ruffians who worked for Unkar Plutt, or the local constabulary, the law, such as it was on Jakku. But no one was there, because she had nothing they wanted, nothing of value.

Some bread and re-hydrated vegetables she had left from last night's meal and so she ate a bit of it, and saved some…just in case. She washed it down with two, only two, mouthfuls of water from a small canteen. Then Rey splashed a bit more water on a cloth and carefully washed her face and neck and hands. She looked in a small broken mirror at her reflection. She saw soft eyes, brown hair, a thin face, unmarred by any blemishes, and very white straight teeth. I am pretty, she thought, but no one but Lor San had ever said so, and he had stopped saying so when she got older and became a woman. She had seen the stares from some inhabitants, and knew what they thought and wanted, and the leers of Unkar Plutt made her shiver sometimes, but anyone's advances she quickly rebuffed and after a time no one bothered her anymore, leaving her innocent in all the ways of love and what came with it.

After she washed her face, Rey tied up her hair in three small buns on the back, a style she favored because it kept her hair out of her eyes while she worked and also three small buns were better than one big clumsy bun or a long braid that could get caught in some machinery while she worked. And for another it was her style, since she was a little girl. She had vague memories of her mother making it for her. All this and the fact that she liked it led her to keep the same style for years.

She dressed in her usual garb, a sleeveless sand colored tunic over her shirt and breeches. Next she wrapped long strips of material around her arms, to protect them from the harsh sun and the metal parts often found in the tight places she worked. Leather wrist bands helped protect her as well as added support for the jobs she did by hand. A belt she wrapped around her waist and attached to this was a large leather pouch with the tools she needed tucked inside. She grabbed her head scarf and the goggles with an attached light that she would need to wear inside the wrecked Star Destroyer she was working on to protect her eyes from the dust and help her see in the darkness.

Outside she had just begun to warm up her speeder and was about to climb on when a voice shouted her name in one of the many languages of Jakku.

She quickly grabbed her staff and spun around to face the small boy coming over the nearby sand dune. He was human, but did not speak her tongue. Another servant of Unkar she knew. Seban was his name, a sandy haired boy with sharp green eyes and a deep tan.

"Hey, Seban," she said in his words, lowering her staff.

"Hi, Rey," the boy said as he jogged down the sand dune to her side. "Unkar wants you."

She grunted. "Tell him he can wait. I have some work to do."

"Wants you now, he said, even if I have to drag you there."

She smiled. "Think you can drag me there?"

"No, no," Saben said in worry. "Just his words, you know. Said he needs you on that Corellian freighter."

"Not again," she said in exasperation. "What now?"

"Don't know. But he's mad. He had some buyers for it out yesterday and it won't start. Not even the lights came on. They tried to walk away, but he convinced them to come back tomorrow. He said it's your fault it won't start."

That steamed her. "No, it's his fault for all the modifications he had put on it. I looked it over three days ago and told him all he was doing wrong. Tell him that hunk of junk will never fly again if he keeps me and the others tinkering with it."

"You tell him. He gets mad if I tell him."

Rey thought a moment. She was frustrated by this unnecessary diversion but she knew she had to go. It would not do to make Unkar mad. He controlled the food supplies…so he had the power.

"Right. Climb on."

She shoved her staff into the cargo netting on the left side of the speeder and then she helped him up on, and got up herself. On the one person seat it was tight squeeze but she was thin and so was he so they fit well enough.

A short time later they arrived at Niima Outpost, the only place that could be called civilization in this barren land, and even it was not much to look at. A burnt orange colored archway, left over from when one of the Hutt clans had tried to make a colony here, a few small structures, many tents, and the rest was junk. Broken engines, burned out speeders, piles of scrap metal waiting for shipment, rusty fuel tanks, and a central well, that had a salty water that would do if you were desperate or an animal but was not as sweet as the wells the rough traders controlled.

And then there were the ships, many ships, some flyable, like the quad jumper Unkar owned that she had learned to fly on. It was a simple four engine short haul cargo ship. Other ships were not flyable, used for spare parts and scrap, or were in states of repair, like the old dirty grey Corellian freighter. Rey had never flown it, no one had in years as far as she knew.

When Rey told anyone she was a pilot they often looked at her in surprise. And then the next question would be, if you are a pilot why are you still here, on this rock? She was waiting for her family, but usually she never told them that, as that was her business and not anyone else's.

Learning to fly had been something she had done on her own. All those years crawling through cockpits and looking at instrument panels, and learning the inner secrets of ships had sunk into her whole being, as if she was part of a ship herself.

The first time she had flown she was fourteen years old. Unkar had gathered up thirty of his scavengers and many of his thugs and they had flown in the quad jumper halfway across Jakku to a wrecked Star Destroyer no one had laid claim to yet. Over sixty days they had stayed there, salvaging all they could, and on occasion Unkar and his pilot took the jumper back to Niima Outpost with loads of scavenged parts. Once he had taken Rey with him, to help clean and fix the parts as they flew. Halfway there the pilot had a fatal seizure and slumped over his controls. Thankfully it was on autopilot but they still had to land. Unkar was no pilot and was about to have a seizure himself. Rey had instinctively jumped in the copilot seat, turned off the autopilot, and safely landed the ship.

Rey thought he would be grateful, but he merely grunted. "So, you can fly." With his pilot dead, Unkar needed a new one, and he let her learn how on the quad jumper. But always he warned her. "You try to leave Jakku, I will find that old man who is your friend and stake him out in the sand till the sun boils his eyes." She knew he would do it, had done as much to one of his rivals. Unkar also knew she was waiting for her family, and would never leave Jakku as long as their was hope they were coming back. So she had never left Jakku, even after she had her freedom, and had never been far in space, just in close orbit over the planet.

And she had certainly never flown the Corellian freighter. Rey headed her speeder right for it now. Unkar Plutt was standing outside the boarding ramp, which was down.

"You," he said with a snarl as she and Saben climbed down. Saben took off without a word, the fear on his face obvious. Standing next to Unkar were two of his thugs, menacing brutes to most people, but Rey had no fear of them. At least she didn't show any, for showing fear on Jakku was one way to have all you owned taken away.

"What did you do to my ship?" Unkar asked with menace in his tone.

"Exactly what you told me to do," she answered, wanting to add a few choice insults, but deciding not to. She still needed to get some food off of him. "As for the rest, if someone else mucked it up it's not my fault."

"It's not working!" Unkar shouted.

"Let me take a look," she said. She moved to the ramp but he stood in her way and glared down at her.

"You don't fix it girl, I will see you starve." Rey said nothing, and after a moment he stepped aside.

The interior was dark, no power or lights on at all. Rey slipped on her goggles and turned on the lamp that was attached to the right side and then made her way to the power fuse switches just aft of the cockpit. In less than a minute she had the power back on, a blown circuit breaker the problem, as she suspected. She took off the goggles and moved to the cockpit. As the ship began to hum and light up Unkar came charging into the cockpit just behind her as she started to power down the unessential functions that would drain power.

"How did you do that?" he asked, looming over her as she sat in the pilot's seat.

"You know, Unkar, in all the years I have known you, I've never seen you lift one wrench or screwdriver or welding torch. That's why you need people like me."

He smiled in a sort of menacing way. "Right you are. But you still need people like me too. So tell me how you did it."

"It was just a blown circuit breaker which will blow again if you try to light up everything. I switched off a lot of unnecessary things. But the main problem is you put too much power into this compressor for the hyperdrive, which I told you was not needed anyway. It puts too much stress on the hyperdrive. It needs to be bypassed."

"That compressor will make the jump to hyperspace faster and make the power supply last longer you said!"

"No, I didn't. Rondo said that. And Rondo put it in, didn't he?"

"He did," Unkar admitted. "What do I do?"

"Take it out."

"No time. Customer coming back tomorrow, if I get the power fixed. Wants to fly it."

Rey laughed and Unkar glared. "This thing hasn't flown since…what was it, more than two years ago you stole it off the Urwin boys?"

"I didn't steal it," Unkar told her. "Was a fair trade, it was. Their lives for their ship. Sounds fair, don't it?"

"If you say so. Look, you want it to fly and go into hyperdrive, give me a couple of days to take out the compressor and fix a few other things, like this fuel pump that needs to be primed. Another waste of time and energy. All it will cost you is…ten full portions. And ten liters of water. Sweet water."

"No deal."

"Why not?"

"Because I know it will fly off this planet. Once they are in space if the hyperdrive don't work, that's their problem. And I don't need you around telling them that it don't work. So make yourself scarce."

Rey stood up from the pilot's seat and reached for a switch on the port side panel. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Shutting off the power."

"No! Leave it be."

"Look, just flip this…"

"No. The power stays on. The lights also."

She shrugged. "If you say so."

"I do."

"Is that it then?"

"For now. I am sure I will see you later today."

"Might have some fuse relays."

"Not much call for them."

"Okay, I'll just take them over to Astar village and see…"

"Well, maybe I could use a few. If they are in good shape. And cleaned up."

"As always."

But the rest of the day didn't go as planned. Her speeder broke down halfway to the scrap fields and it took her all day to fix it and by then it was near sunset. She only had time to make it home before dark came, and for her dinner she only had the last bits of re-hydrated bread and vegetables left from a half portion she had gotten two days before.

Afterwards Rey's stomach growled for more but there was no more, not even for breakfast and she would have to work without any food tomorrow. Not the first time that had happened, nor would it be the last most likely. She went out to the sand dune above her home to look around, make sure no one was close by.

In the dying rays of the sun she saw a flash of light on the horizon, coming from the south. Soon a dot appeared, getting bigger, moving faster, and in moments a ship zipped by over her head, the pilot hugging the dunes, swerving to avoid a distant wrecked Star Destroyer, and moving off to the north in the direction of Lor San's village. She could feel the heat of its engines as it had passed by, eddies of sand blown up by the passing ship making her cover her eyes.

She wondered why the ship was here on Jakku, especially since she knew that ship type. X-Wing it was called, a Rebel Alliance ship, also used by the newer Resistance to the First Order. Why was one here? The X-Wing was familiar because she had scavenged many of them on Jakku, but until now Rey had never actually seen one in flight. She stared off in awe as the ship shrunk to a tiny dot and then was gone.

Rey had heard much about the Rebel Alliance and the newer Resistance, and about the great heroes of the wars. When she was younger she had made a doll that wore what looked like the flight suits the Rebel pilots had worn in the great war. She even had a helmet from one wreck that she sometimes wore and imagined she was the famed Rebel pilot Luke Skywalker who had singled handily destroyed the first Death Star and helped defeat the Emperor and Darth Vader. Everyone knew his name, though some said it was all lies, that no man could have done so much, and that he was only a myth. When she asked Lor San about Skywalker he always changed the subject, so after a while Rey stopped asking.

But Rey knew she would never be a hero like Skywalker, even if he was real. She was here, on Jakku, fighting to live day by day. As the X-Wing disappeared she sighed loudly and then chided herself for feeling down. No use in letting dreams into her life. There was no place or time for them.

Rey walked back to her home and opened the hatch. No one here, as usual. She made sure the speeder was locked up tight, the ignition starter was removed, and then she went inside her home. Darkness was closing in and so she lit the small fuel heater/cooker which also gave her some light. A quick look up at the interior steel wall and she saw the thousands of straight scratches that she had made to mark the passing of each day since her family had left. When she had first moved in she had marked all the ones that had gone by when she was in service to Unkar Plutt, living in a tent with four other scavengers in Niima Outpost. Twelve years it had been. It took her days to make all those scratches. And then she added the rest, day by day, as time passed. Now she added one more.

She changed her clothes to get ready for bed, took a sniff and realized her clothing needed a good wash. So did she for that matter. Extra water for bathing and soap were luxuries she could ill afford. But Rey knew where she could lay her hands on something valuable. In one of the Star Destroyers she had just discovered a whole row of plasma chargers, which were once used to fire up the derelict ship's massive turbo cannon lasers. Unkar Plutt would pay well for them, maybe a half portion of packaged food each, or even a full portion if he was feeling generous, and then she could trade some of the food for water and soap. He had traded with her well for such valuable items in the past, even though she knew he still bore a grudge for her decision to move out here as far from him and his leering eyes as she could.

Maybe the plasma chargers could wait a day. She knew with no food she would not have the energy to dig out those plasma chargers, as they were in a tight spot. She had been working on one section of a Star Destroyer's central power relays and wanted to clear it out first. Already her long rope was there, leading from the floor of a hanger to the central power column. Some fuses for the relays were still there and she could get a bit of food for them and Unkar had promised to take them. If her speeder hadn't broken down she would already have them. And then after getting some food maybe if she had time she would go over to Lor San's village to see if that X-Wing had really landed there or had moved on. But then she remembered she didn't have much fuel left for her speeder, so that idea was quickly shut aside. She also worried on it breaking down in the middle of nowhere. She would use the payment for the plasma chargers to get more food, more fuel, and new parts for the speeder and the other things she needed.

Rey untied her hair and let it fall loose to her shoulders and then she turned off the fuel heater/cooker, lay on her hammock, and pulled her thin blanket around her thin body. Other day had passed, another lonely day on Jakku, like the thousands before. And tomorrow would be the same, she knew all too well, another day of just trying to stay alive…another day of waiting…for her family, for someone, anyone, to let her know that her life had to have more meaning than what it had been up to now.


End file.
